The Reading Experience

Stock-Taking

The Litblog Co-op is closing down, mainly because so many of its members have become so preoccupied with their own blogs, as well as other literary endeavors that in some cases their blogs helped to make possible, that they could not devote the kind of time and attention required to keep a loosely-affiliated group like the LBC functioning adequately. The LBC was formed with a specific mission to highlight books that weren't being discussed much, or at all, in mainstream book sections by putting the collective authority of the then better-known literary weblogs behind the selection of one book per quarter the group believed was worth readers' attention.

I'd like to take the LBC's dissolution as an opportunity to not only reflect on its success in highlighting such books but also on the evolution of the literary blog from the time (actually only 3-4 years ago) when "literary weblog" seemed merely a peculiar conjunction of words to the present moment, when the litblog has become sufficiently established that numerous print-based critics have attacked literary blogs for encroaching on their territory (the gates to which they apparently intend to keep).

When I discovered what I would identify as the original group of self-identified literary weblogs--Maud Newton, The Literary Saloon, Moorish Girl, Golden Rule Jones, The Elegant Variation, The Return of the Reluctant, a few others--I had for a while wondered why there was not more web-based literary discussion and criticism, since such discussion on the internet could be both more widely disseminated and more up-to-date than what was published in magazines--most of which had actually been moving away from providing their content online--or even in newspapers, only a very few of which printed literary-related commentary on a semi-regular basis, anyway. What I found on these ur-litblogs was, if not fully worked-out literary criticism, an obvious enthusiasm about books and an admirable interest in serious fiction. As a lapsed academic, I was especially pleased to find such an interest among people who, in most cases, were not academics, since living in the world of the academy can lead one to suspect there are no serious readers of serious fiction outside its insulated walls.

My alienation from academe was in part a reaction against the prevailing modes of academic criticism, which in my view had essentially abandoned "literature itself" in favor of critical approaches that were mostly just a way of doing history or sociology by other means. I had pursued a Ph.D in literary study in order to study literature, not to validate my political allegiances on the cheap, or to study something called "culture," an artifact of which literature might be considered but given no more emphasis than any other cultural "expression." I was looking to find a way to write literary criticism that continued to focus on the literary qualities of literature, and to that end had published several critical essays in publications that would still print such efforts when I happened upon the literary weblogs I have mentioned. I soon enough concluded there was no reason the literary blog could not accomodate a form of literary criticism--longer than the typical kind of post I was seeing on the extant litblogs but shorter than the conventional scholarly article or long critical essay. Trying out these possibilities has been the ongoing project of this blog over the now four years of its existence.

At a time when still print-bound critics and book reviewers seem to be handing off a rhetorical baton in their eagerness to keep ahead of the perceived threat posed by literary blogs, it is rather difficult to recall how thoroughly marginal to the established critical discourse the literary weblog was in the first months and years of its existence. Among the criticisms that were directed at literary blogs in this initial stage of audience-building was the accusation they were too insular, too preoccupied with linking to each other in a kind of in-group celebration. And indeed there was a good deal of cliquish cross-linking, but this was mostly, it seemed to me, a function of the litblog's presumed marginality, a way of creating a community of engaged readers--the early bloggers were readers first of all--who could communicate their interests, insights, and enthusiasms to like-minded others. While most of us exploring the boundaries of the new medium were surely hoping our posting might attract a wider audience, I don't think many anticipated such a dramatic increase in attention paid to litblogs as did indeed occur. (The suddenness of this increase can be illustrated by the fact that as recently as BEA 2005, efforts by the then just-created Litblog Co-op--specifically by LBC mastermind Mark Sarvas--to interest the powers that be at the BEA in a panel discussion of literary blogs were rebuffed because few people associated with the event had heard of literary blogs.)

The Litblog Co-op was created during the first wave of interest in literary weblogs from beyond the small corner of the blogosphere litbloggers and their initial audience had staked out for themselves--a few noticies in newspapers, links from more established, non-literary blogs, comments from "name" authors and critics increasingly showing up on various litblogs. As I recall it, the LBC aimed to accomplish two related goals: to bring attention to small-press books and less-known writers, and, implicitly, to raise the profile of literary weblogs even higher, to make them, through the authority the LBC might acquire from its selections, more of an accepted presence in the national conversation about books and writers. These were both entirely laudable goals, one directed toward showcasing alternatives to the fiction most loudly celebrated by the "book business," one directed toward providing alternative sources of discussion and debate about current fiction.

I'd have to say that our success in accomplishing the first goal was mixed. Several books that received little or no attention in the mainstream review pages did get some exposure as LBC nominees. Some of these were books by first-time authors, while others were by more veteran authors (some in translation) whose previous work had not gotten them the recognition they might have deserved. However, I don't think the LBC was ultimately able to establish itself as an authoritative guide to small-press books and overlooked fiction, judging by the degree of notice taken of our selections by blogs not themselves part of the LBC or by the literary community more generally, as well as by the number of comments most of the postings on the LBC blog received. The LBC's Read This! selections just never seemed to achieve the status with readers of current fiction that they were originally meant to achieve.

I believe that one explanation for this failure is that the LBC never really recovered from the disappointment spawned by its very first selection, a more or less mainstream work of "literary fiction" that had already been widely reviewed and whose selection seemed to many (including me) to be inconsistent with the LBC's stated mission. This selection perhaps indicated that the LBC was going to be business as usual, choosing the same old books published by the same old publishers and reviewed in the same old high-profile book reviews. Our subsequent selections mostly demonstrated that this was not the case, but it may be that an impression was left that the LBC wasn't quite the champion of unduly neglected fiction it was claiming to be.

It may also be that, eventually at least, the Litblog Co-op was perceived as a too narrowly-constituted, "clubbish" sort of group. When the LBC was formed, it could plausibly claim to represent the "leading" literary weblogs, but the litblogosphere has so dramatically expanded, both in sheer numbers of blogs and in the quality of the posting to be found there, that it really could no longer assert itself as the collective voice of the preeminent litbloggers. The LBC did enlarge its membership, and continued to invite new members when places became available, but this only made the process of nominating titles, choosing a favorite, and posting on the ultimate selection increasingly unwieldy, and it would have only gotten worse if we'd expanded the membership once again. When the litblogosphere was a fairly self-contained space, populated by bloggers united by a desire to identify worthy books and confer a kind of "indie" credential to these books, it was still possible for the member bloggers of the LBC to consider themselves the vanguard of a new online literary movement, but by now such a claim just isn't credible.

As for the second goal of bringing more attention to literary weblogs, there is no doubt that litblogs have established themselves as part of literary culture, but I don't really think this was a direct result of the actions of the Litblog Co-op. Perhaps the existence of the LBC did contribute to the increase of weblogs dedictated to literature, both past and present, but it was only a modest factor among those that led more readers to litblogs and ultimately led some of them to become litbloggers. I think it's probable that the individual members of the LBC did more to make the litblogosphere an accepted source of information about and judgment of current fiction on their own blogs than did the LBC itself. It's likely that a given title can be exposed to a potential audience just as effectively when two or three or more individual bloggers discover it and consider its merits as when it is in effect made the winner of a competition conducted by some such organization as the Litblog Co-op.

In this way the LBC may have unwittingly performed at least one useful service. Its relatively brief existence, and the reasons for its brevity, suggests that probably there will be no online version of the National Book Critics Circle, no self-appointed arbiters of literary value on the net to rival the NBCC and other print-based critics' associations that exist mainly to bestow awards. This does not mean the litblogosphere, for example, cannot wield the authority represented by these kinds of groups, but it does mean that whatever authority literary blogs do attain will be much more widely dispersed, not concentrated in organized groups pretending to encompass the "best" available judgment about current fiction or poetry. Since there is no such "best" judgment, just as the books chosen as "best" by the NBCC, The National Book Awards, or, indeed, the Litblog Co-op are no such thing (except by accident), readers will need to find the litblogs that consistently examine the sorts of books they find they like to read. This may result in a further fracturing of the litblogosphere into zones of "niche" interest, but this will only reflect an already existing diversity of taste and preference and will hardly lead to the destruction of a "common" literary culture, the existence of which is and always was a myth.

I expect the litblogosphere to continue to grow. I especially expect an increase in blogs offering longer-form commentary and criticism, as opposed to the link-centered blog that defined the literary weblog in its first years of existence but that by now has become just one kind of litblog among others. The more that literary blogs become credible contributors to critical/literary discourse, the less will be the need of an organization like the Litblog Co-op, or for any other effort to unite bloggers on behalf of the literary blog as a medium for serious literary discussion. Considering that all signs point to a decline in literary coverage in newspapers and magazines, I still believe the time may come when blogs and other forms of online publishing will dominate the literary discussion. If so, the LBC will have played some short-term role in underscoring the potential of literary weblogs, although their long-term potential is still to be tested.

An Instant Reaction

The very best evidence that "literary criticism" as practiced by literary journalists has become utterly bankrupt continues to pour forth from the leaking pens of the journalists themselves. Now it's William Skidelsky, who informs us that "while blogs make a great deal of fuss about being where the action is, they contain little decent criticism. It is rare to encounter good critical writing on the internet that didn't start life in print form." He also opines that "blogging is best suited to instant reaction; it thus has an edge when it comes to disseminating gossip and news."

I've always thought that "journalism" involves to at least some minimal degree something called "reporting," which ought, it seems to me, to call for some actual inquiry and research into the subject at hand. If Skidelsky were to, say, click onto a few of the litblogs listed on the right (I'll gladly give him some recommenations if he'd like), he would in fact discover that his assertions are thoroughly without foundation in reality. These days I find much more "decent criticism" at these sites than in print magazines and newspapers (where, as Skidelsky himself admits, "[f]ew reviews buck the critical consensus or challenge long-inflated reputations"), and most of the best new blogs that come along do not offer "gossip and news." These comments are just the same old defensive conventional wisdom that "literary journalists" seem to be passing among themselves with increasingly great dispatch.

Why do people like Skidelsky continue to pronounce in such a tedious drone on a subject about which they quite clearly know nothing? Doesn't some editor, somewhere, ever tell them they should try to find out (by maybe reading some litblogs) whether their imperious declarations can really be supported by the facts?

ADDENDUM And if we needed more evidence that print book reviewing is sinking into a bog of its own making, there's this announcement that Bookforum is now going to "include current events coverage in a move to boost circulation." Which means, of course, that it will now print much less "decent criticism." It will no doubt be yet another once-valuable-now-gone-to-shit print publication I'll have to stop reading.

Thanks (I guess) to Imani for the link.

Gatekeepers We Know

According to NBCC board member Jane Ciabattari

within a few years the literary blogosphere will have been mostly digested by the websites of the larger newspapers, [and] the Hearsts and Murdochs and Newhouses of the world, who have the capital and the business savvy to figure out how to attract the most talented, will become the dominant forces online. Online readers are increasingly women, increasingly people over 40, and polls indicate that they will be most likely to trust the gatekeepers they know—i.e., newspapers with familiar names—to give them online news.

Won't never happen. While it's certainly possible that the "larger newspapers" will continue to offer their own versions of the literary weblog, if the current exemplars are any indication, they won't come close to satisfying the need that brought blogs into prominence in the first place. At best they're chatty and superficial, at worst just dumb. The desire for substantive discussion of contemporary fiction, and of books other than the usual suspects lined up in the Sunday book reviews, that the litblogsphere exploited successfully just isn't being fulfilled in these pseudo-blogs, and as long as the big media providers continue to think of blogs as merely a function of "business savvy," it won't be. Big media will continue to offer the same shallow commentaty online it's been offering in print, and literary bloggers who want more will continue to thrive.

Later in this interview, Ciabattari remarks that "I also spend enough time in rural areas where broadband Internet connections are either unavailable or too expensive that I'm only too aware that printing is still an important technology—and that it's important to maintain it for those who read newspaper book reviews, whether at home or in local libraries; whether from desire or necessity." So this is now the last refuge of the print-sniffers? We need to maintain book reviews for those few (very few) people who live in rural areas, who read newspaper book reviews, and can't get access to the internet? That's pretty pathetic.

The War Between Two Sensibilities

This short essay by Adam Kirsch on W. H. Auden's intervention in "the war between the two sensibilities, the two social and spiritual visions, that Auden names Apollo and Hermes" is a sensible enough analysis of the conflict named, but my most immediate response was that the essay had the feel of a good blog post. Not too long, not deliberately truncated, but well-reasoned and including an insightful reading of the poet. This occured to me because, of course, Adam Kirsch has prominently dismissed litblogs as sources of valid literary criticism. What has been gained, in terms of its validity, by having this essay appear in print rather than on a blog? Aside from the "Harvard" in the magazines's title?

(And of course many of us will only read the essay in its online version, which makes it the functional equivalent of a blog post.)

Erosion

According to an article in indieWire:

. . .technology's greatest gift to film culture may be the blogosphere, which has seemingly ignited a passionate audience for auteur cinema around the country. Film historian David Bordwell, whose film textbooks are used in college classrooms around the world, has recently taken to blogging, which he calls an "overturning of the critical establishment," he says. "In the 1950s and 1960s, when film culture really got going, it was a small space, mostly in New York City. Now that monopoly is eroding very fast and there is a tremendous amount of people out there. They don't buy newspapers. They're not my students, and they're not the general public, either," he continues. "And their cinephilia is much greater."

I don't know that American literary culture was ever literally a "small space," but it is surely the case that it has long been centered in New York City, whose writers, critics, and publishers have consituted whatever "critical establishment" exists in this country. (Some people might regard the academy as the intellectual arm of our critical establishment, but academic criticism has all but lost interest in monitoring current writers and their work except insofar as these writers can be made to align with the critic's own external political objectives.) It has exerted a "monopoly" on what ultimately can be regarded as acceptable practive both of fiction-writing and of literary criticism in the same way New York film culture monopolized the critical discourse about film. All other practices are marginalized, even if in the long run they turn out to be more influential or more durable than those sanctioned by the establishment. (One thinks of Gilbert Sorrentino, a native New Yorker whose work--in criticism as well as in poetry and fiction--was essentially invisible to this establishment, and who could barely get an infuriatingly perfunctory obituary from the New York Times on his death.)

(And I don't mean this to be a slam against New York City per se. A critical establishment has to be located somewhere, and in our case New York is it.)

To this extent, I wonder if the blogosphere (the cybersphere more generally) is having/will have the same kind of effect on literary culture Bordwell believes it is having on film culture. It would seem that the litblogosphere has indeed demonstrated there are large numbers of people "out there" who take a passionate interest in books and writing, people who have not much been taken into account by the "mainstream" outlets of opinion (they're not just members of the "general public") but who clearly know literature just as extensively as those reviewers and critics sanctioned by the establishment and have intelligent things to say about it. I think a journey down the blogrolls on the right will demonstrate this to be the case, both through the blog posts themselves and through the comment threads many of them attract.

The establishment response to litblogs has lately been pretty uniformly and intensely negative. Bloggers are accused of being "pooters" who should leave the real thinking to those reviewers who get paid to do it. They sell themselves out "for a couple of review copies and a link on a blogroll." Even when blogs are ostensibly being praised, establishment types prescribe that they "are supposed to be fun and freewheeling, filled with quick snippets written in a breezy, conversational voice," as if this will safely distinguish them from the more serious work being done in the newspapers (!). Perhaps this is all justifiable criticism, but perhaps it is also the collective voice of panic being expressed by those whose authority "is eroding very fast."

Other Spaces, Other Things

To some extent, I agree with Adam Kotsko that "Meta-blogging is the greatest vice yet developed by humankind." Blogging about blogging can become just another variation on navel-gazing, and the triumphalist celebration of blogs by some prominent political blogs can be especially obnoxious. But at this point in the development of the weblog as a forum for serious discourse (at least potentially), Adam is right to "wonder what exactly can be done in a blog post." In some ways, seriously-intended blogs and blog posts can be an alternative to conventional print publications, both academic and general-interest, in others they are best seen as a complement to print, but it doesn't seem likely, or even desirable, that they simply imitate the conventions of journalism or academic scholarship. Therefore, those of us who do see a place for blogging in intellectual/literary discussion ought to be making the attempt to clarify, for ourselves and our readers, the distinctive nature of its contribution, what indeed "can be done" using this medium to engage in substantive debate or commentary about literature, philosophy, or any of the other traditionally "academic" subjects.

Surely it can't be that, as Adam puts it, blog posting is "best suited to matters that can be treated conversationally," if by "conversational" Adam means "casual" or "superficial." Certainly blog posts can be casual or superficial, but I see nothing in the nature of the form that requires they be so. In his own response to Adam's post, John Holbo makes a point that I want to echo: "Blog posts are short, but obviously no one thinks there are no arguments worth making at less than a thousand words." Good arguments and, in the case of literary criticism, compelling readings can indeed be made in a "short" blog post; some arguments and analyses would greatly benefit, in fact, if they were confined to 1500 words or so and shed themselves of the formulaic padding "long" forms sometimes superfluously require. Morover, I can't see why longer essay-posts treating a topic in a more expansively developed way are inherently impossible: I've read many such posts, and one would think that readers interested in the topic at hand would be willing to read a well-thought out treatment of it whatever the medium in which it's printed. (Screen fatigue seems to me a pretty inadequate excuse for avoiding a perfectly good piece of writing simply because it's online.)

Adam's claim is similar to a remark made recently by Joshua Marshall at Talking Points Memo. In a post otherwise defending blogging against criticism by certain print snobs, Marshall suggests that "blogging is an ephemeral form of writing. It's written quickly, usually forgotten quickly. It doesn't lend itself to that sort of rigorous writing and rewriting which is often the way you discover your ideas in your own mind." But even if some bloggers in practice regard their posts as something to be "written quickly," or even if the blogsphere in general is perceived to be crammed with such posts, that doesn't mean blog writing must be practiced in this way. Is there really anything inherent in the way words appear in cyberspace as opposed to the way they appear on a piece of paper that prevents it from being a medium for "that sort of rigorous writing and rewriting which is often the way you discover your ideas in your own mind"? Isn't "rigor" of this kind a product of the kind of effort being put forth by the writer rather than a function of the form? (And on the question of discovering ideas, see this post by Dorothy W at Of Books and Bicycles, in which she affirms that blogging "about what I think makes me have better thoughts.")

In a recent essay at Bad Subjects, Jodi Dean makes a point about the deliberative potential of blogs that one would think Adam Kotsko might appreciate:

. . .The fast pace of networked communication is a prominent meme. Opinions, image, and information are said to circulate rapidly through the blogosphere, like some kind of digital ebola or influenza. For most, this rapidity is a problem, or an excuse. It explains a lack of reflection, the need to respond immediately.

But theory blogs aren’t like this. A discussion on theory blogs might spread over half a dozen or more blogs over the course of weeks, like some kind of long running seminar. So, I post something about solidarity on I Cite, picking up or reiterating themes already in play on the Weblog and Posthegemony. The blog Before the Law posts a critical rejoinder, countered from different directions in multiple posts by various authors at Long Sunday and again at the Weblog. Sometimes, someone will accumulate the links and post a general guide to the conversation (the blogger from Theoria does this from time to time). Rather than a fast paced media sphere, this exchange is like a slow seminar, focusing on one narrow question that arises on its own, and is addressed over a longer period of time, giving those who engage it opportunity to read and reflect.

In other words, at his own blog and in his contributions to others, Adam has himself exemplified a kind of blog discourse and a kind of blog protocol that, while not substituting for those of academe, certainly have every claim to being taken seriously and not just dismissed as "talk," an offhand way of passing one's free time. Further, its' not just "theory blogs" that foster the kind of discussion Jodi Dean describes. Plenty of literary weblogs are focused on longer posts that are frequently part of cross-blog debates that at their best have a seminar-like feel without being pompous. (See, for example, this recent set of posts on Muriel Spark.) A similar desire to go beyond current book news and engage in more substantive commentary about current fiction underlies the Litblog Co-op's week-long discussions of selected small-press books and less-recognized writers. A number of film blogs have been participating in "blogathons" on specified topics, which generally result in lively and informative mini-essays. (A guide to the latest of these blogathons can be found here.) Whatever this kind of blog discourse may lack in conventional "rigor" is certainly balanced out by its immediacy and its enthusiasm.

But Adam seems most of all to be disillusioned by the comment threads that develop on some blogs, threads that devolve into "blogfights" and debates that "go nowhere." This has become a fairly common complaint. The blogosphere provides "scant room for debate and infinite opportunities for fruitless point-scoring: the heady combination of perceived anonymity, gestated responses, random heckling and a notional 'live audience' quickly conspire to create a 'perfect storm' of perpetual bickering." According to Alan Jacobs, "On many blogs the comments to a given post are 'closed' after a few days—no one is allowed to make further comments—usually because that helps to prevent the accumulation of comment spam, but also because so many threads degenerate into name-calling that the blog administrator has to shoo the belligerents along to another venue. And in any case both the blogger and the commenters have moved along to other posts, other ideas, other conversations." In general, it would seem, the comment space on weblogs has come to be seen as a place for partisan piling-on, where the converted speak to the converted, or else a kind of intellectual no-man's land, which the innocent traveller looking for disinterested debate enters at his/her peril.

I have never really understood what seems to me an obsession with comments among some bloggers. On the one hand, attracting comments is seen as a measure of a particular post's success, even of a blog's success on the whole. On the other, there is much lamentation when the comment count does indeed begin to climb but the tenor of the thread descends into vituperation and insult. I like receiving thoughtful comments on my own posts as much as anybody, but I don't consider a post a failure (whatever that might mean) if no comments ensue. Indeed, most of us are by now undoubtedly aware of this fairly consistent phenomenon: A short, trenchant if not particularly thought-out post receives numerous, equally trenchant comments, while a longer, more carefully developed post draws distressingly few. But this is really a problem only if you think "blogging" should be confined to the first kind of post and the second is something else--something that should have instead sought out those "other spaces for other things" that Adam refers to at the end of his post. Although presumably these are the very sort of blog posts that produces the "blogfights" of which Adam disapproves. Why then rule out of court the very possibility that blogs might aspire to something more substantive, even if they don't make so much use of their comment functions?

Ultimately, what "can be done in a blog post" is whatever it and its author want it to do. For now, most readers of blogs still prefer that a post remain reasonably brief and not otherwise the kind of discourse more profitably read in print. But to me this is mainly a matter of expediency: The portability of print is still an advantage, and that mode of reading that occurs in the proverbial easychair or the library nook does still have its pleasures. And these preferences may change, may already be changing. If readers do become fatigued with the "ephemeral," rapid-fire style of blogging, is the alternative simply to pronouce blogs deceased because only that style counts as blogging to begin with, or is it to explore the possibilites of a quieter, less anxious style? Perhaps not picking a blogfight is the best way to avoid it. Perhaps the real alternative to the cumbersome processes of academic publishing, which place too little value on novelty and spontaneity, and to the distance from readers imposed by print publication is not the kind of call-and-reponse weblog post that leads to the impulsive quarrels to which Adam Kotsko rightly objects but a style of webwriting that seeks to illuminate rather than provoke, that isn't defined by the number of comments it invites but remains open to critical dialogue nevertheless. (Because it does occur online, it would inevitably be subject to the commentary-through-linkage that is actually superior to the print conventions of citation and critique, precisely because of its own expediency.) If this is "conversation," so be it, but ultimately all forms of inquiry have to be conversational in this way, or they're not very scholarly in the first place.

Continuous Public Conversations

Wendy Lesser has provided the following comment on my previous post about her introduction to her new Lesser Blog:

I've made a few postings elsewhere to explain what I thought I was doing, both in the removal of the offending remarks and in the design of the blog in the first place. Basically, I was trying to do something that did not involve a continuous public conversation in a public forum -- that had room for private response and discussion and disagreement, in a one-to-one way (via email, for instance), but that didn't involve a public-message-board aspect, with people ganging up on one side or another.

Obviously I misunderstood the medium, to some extent -- but can't such misunderstandings sometime lead to new versions of the medium itself? I was hoping that my blog (if it can be called a blog, which is apparently debatable) might lead to some considerations of the ideas expressed in the posting itself, but all the response focused on the tone of my initial note, which was merely meant to be introductory. Well, no, it was probably meant to be inflammatory as well, but that was obviously a bad idea if I wanted my ideas about Mark Morris to get any attention.

And now that it's gone, I do miss the phrase "blessedly impersonal," because that represented something I care about in the discussion of art. That is, it would be nice if ideas and opinions about the arts could have a tone that is not just that of a personal squabble (the way it so often seems in the pages of the New York Times Book Review, for instance ), but that draws on some other notion of evaluation. I guess I am trying to do something that is at once less personal and less public than the normal multi-voiced blog, because I think criticism of the sort I write is basically a one-to-one conversation, writer to reader (and, if he likes, reader to writer, in an answering letter or email, or even in the privacy of his own mind, which is how I do most of my answering to critics, dead or alive). . . .

I can't help but continue to perceive in Wendy Lesser's tone an unwillingness to sully herself with the term "blogger." If she wants to avoid "continuous public conversation in a public forum," I'm not sure why she would offer up her compromise blog whatchamacallit in the first place. If what she wants is "private response and discussion and disagreement, in a one-to-one way (via email, for instance). . .that [doesn't] involve a public-message-board aspect," then why not just encourage people to send her e-mails if they want to talk about her latest print essay? Or make more of her publication (The Threepenny Review) availabe online and create some kind of reader forum? Her third paragraph in particular ("criticism of the sort I write is basically a one-to-one converstation") suggests someone tied to the conventions of print publication, and if weblog discourse makes her so uncomfortable, no one, as far as I can tell, is insisting she abandon those conventions and so superciliously enter the blogosphere.

Although I again have to ask what weblogs she is reading that lead her to generalize about them in the way she does. Plenty of very good literary blogs do not offer "continuous public conversation" if by "continuous" is meant "daily." Some of my favorite blogs offer new posts only a few times a week, and TRE itself rarely features more than 3-4 posts in a given week. And exactly what is she implying in asserting her blog "might lead to some considerations of the ideas expressed in the posting itself"? Again I must ask what literary blogs she reads that cause her to believe most of them don't lead to this kind of rational discourse. Some posts at this blog, for instance, have resulted in comment threads that degenerated into bile and wild assertions, but the vast majority of posts provoking extended comments have led to considered and stimulating discussions. The same thing is true at many of the literary weblogs I read regularly.

Finally, what the hell is a "normal multi-voiced blog"?

At the risk of repeating myself from the initial post on this topic: If you think you're doing something "new" in the medium, Wendy, perhaps you should take the time to actually read the blogs that have defined the medium. I'd invite you to make your way through the blogroll I've provided to the right. You might learn something, and you probably won't even get that dirty.

Blessedly Impersonal

Normally I respond to the appearance of new literary weblogs with curiosity and enthusiasm: I'm eager to see what the new blog has to contribute to the ongoing discourse of the literary blogosphere and am pleased with what seems yet more confirmation of the increasing value the lit blogosphere seems to be accumulating in the literary world more generally. But lately some of these new blogs have not exactly motivated me to lay out the welcome mat. First there's latecomer John Freeman's pissy post wondering whether the few pennies some bloggers get from affilate programs constitute a "(rather large) conflict of interest." Hey, John: If you think most litbloggers are making a pile of cash from their efforts, you should probably abandon you foray into the litblogosphere right now. And please do spare us the "we print reviewers have high standards" sanctimony. You're as much an adjunct of the "book business" as anyone else (as is the National Book Critics Circle), and its advertising money no doubt keeps many of your pages solvent as they continue to steadily dwindle in number.

And now Wendy Lesser, editor of The Threepenny Review, informs us that she too is beginning a blog, but she "is not going to follow most of" the existing blog "rules." Among the ways her blog will differ from all those others:

For one thing, it will be very organized, with listings of its contents (once it accumulates any contents, that is).

For another, I will not be making daily or even weekly postings, and the format will in no way resemble a diary or journal. Each posting will be a little (or not so little) self-contained essay, perhaps more chatty than my usual essays in the magazine, but nonetheless resembling a printed article more than most blog entries do.

And finally, I do not plan to include any photos of my cat or best friends or any other personal items that you would be required to take an interest in. This should come as something of a relief — a blessedly impersonal blog.

I'm not really sure what Wendy means to suggest in averring that her blog will be "organized." I guess she means she'll cut down on the clutter by thinking more deeply about her subjects than the rest of us. But most blogs do indeed list recent posts as sidebar items, and I, for one, try to link to some of my previous posts when they continue to seem relevant to a topic at hand. I can assure Wendy, however, that the number of posts eventually begin to add up, and listing every one of them on the front page can get pretty unwieldy.

I can also assure Wendy that not all blogs, especially litblogs, are "diaries" and personal journals. Some of them are reading journals of sorts, in which the author tries to describe his/her experience reading a particular book, but few of them are the kind of personal confession by which Wendy seems to have stereotyped weblogs. Furthermore, a significant majority of the litblogs listed on my blogroll to the right, for example, already do the kind of "self-contained essay" Wendy is promising us. Plenty of the posts on these blogs are easily as good as many of the "printed articles" I see in a journal like Wendy's. Amazingly enough, in fact, some of us scruffy bloggers stumbled on this idea of the "mini-essay" that Wendy now claims for her very own quite some time ago. Finally, I also like to think of my blog as more or less "impersonal"--that is, focused on texts and the interpretation of texts--but very few of the litblogs I read are "personal" in the sense Wendy seems to be implying here. Some of them go into their personal lives more than I feel comfortable doing, but by and large most of them are "personal" mostly in that they provide a point of view, a personal twist on subjects of interest to readers and writers, an identifiable perspective that is more than anything a refreshing change from the fake "balance" and distorted objectivity one gets from most mainstream literary journalism.

I guess I'll welcome you to the blogosphere anyway, Wendy, but I do wish you would at least actually read the literary weblogs whose conventions you so blithely claim you're going to subvert.

UPDATE. Wendy has now deleted the above quoted passages from her post. Perhaps this means she's reconsidered her assumptions, but it would be nice if she'd also explain why she wrote those things in the first place.